Feb 19, 2008

New Diff Compare Application for OS X

Posted by: Jon Clausen

Directory Compare - Changes.app Text Diff - Changes.app Since I switched to a Mac a couple of years ago, I've found that, for most of my development work, my productivity has increased or remained the same between the applications I was familiar with on Windows and those available for the Mac.

One exception to this, however, has been the lack of a solid file/folder comparison utility. Beyond Compare for Windows, is IMHO the best file and folder comparison utility bar none and it's been sorely missed as a Mac convert. When I've got a particularly complex series of files which need to be merged, I'll often open up a Parallels virtual machine just to use BC.

I've tried several decent utilities on the Mac, including Guiffy and ZSCompare. Both are very adequate for basic, single file, comparisons but fall short when dealing with complex directory structures and significant differences in whitespace between files.

Today I stumbled on a post over at Ranchero today cross-linking to a new Leopard-native file comparison utility for the Mac, just released, called Changes.

After downloading and running some test comparisons, I'm mightily impressed. It may not be Beyond Compare just yet, but it has some very, very nice features - including a very robust exclusion filter which excludes .svn,.cvs, and .DS_Store files from the directory merging process - and a great deal of potential. It also has adjustable code coloring and a customizable interface.

The price is also right - free to download and try and $35 for a license. It's also lightning fast compared to the Java-based diff utilities.

 
Continuing the discussion ...
Comments
For years I've used csdiff on the PC (absolutely love it). Not sure if you've tried it yet, but I'm willing to compare the two (downloading "changes" to my Mac now... been missing a good diff program since I converted last summer).

Jeff Coughlin's Gravatar Posted by: Jeff Coughlin - Feb 19, 2008 11:09 PM

What problems do you have with the free FileMerge application from Apple that Changes addresses?

Regards,

Rob...

Rob's Gravatar Posted by: Rob - Mar 14, 2008 4:59 AM

@Jeff - It's been a couple of years now since I've worked with Windows in anything other than a server environment but I do remember trying out CSDiff at the same time as using BC and felt it was worth paying the extra.

@Rob - I've have quite a few client sites that use a common CMS or application framework - highly customized for the client - which need periodic updates or patches from the common trunk.

I've used FileMerge when I'm working with diff comparisons to an SVN branch or trunk (svnX and Subversion for Eclipse for example can use it natively), but I've found that when you have two sets of project files which widely differ in both whitespace and inline, Apple's FileMerge doesn't handle the comparisons well - especially at the directory level.

That said, for basic, single file, comparisons it's very acceptable (and free!).

Jon Clausen's Gravatar Posted by: Jon Clausen - Mar 14, 2008 1:26 PM

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